Conservative Muslims in Pakistan’s northwest are blaming the animist Kalash for a powerful earthquake that flattened entire villages in October, claiming their immoral ways provoked Allah’s wrath, in the latest attack on a diminishing tribe fighting to keep its identity alive.Residents of Chitral district are still reeling from the 7.5 magnitude quake, which ripped through Afghanistan and Pakistan killing more than 390 people and levelling thousands of homes. It came just three months after floods also devastated Chitral, leaving thousands of families camping in the open as winter approaches.
Chitral’s verdant, plunging valleys have long attracted tourists for their natural beauty and their brush with legend as the home of the ancient, polytheistic Kalash, many of whom are fair with light-coloured eyes. Pakistan’s smallest religious minority, they speak their own language and celebrate their gods through music, dance — and alcohol, which they brew themselves for rituals and consumption, but many Muslims in the region feel Allah, angered by such un-Islamic practises, has smited the region with natural disasters. In sixty-eight years the Pakistani society has grown up to become full of hate and intolerance. Notwithstanding the red-handed arrest of many culprits at the crime scene, no official account has ever been given about the perpetrators, backers, financers or masterminds of these heinous crimes. Despite setting up military courts, none of the murderers involved in the killings of minority communities have been brought to justice. Pakistan is a state without any respect for pluralism, without any space for an individual to live an autonomous life. The youth of minority communities live a life of cynicism and despair, hopeless about their future and the ability of the state to protect them from the bigoted monster the majority has become.
We appeal for the freedom of Indian held Kashmir on every international forum and urge the international community to take action against gross human rights violations, but do we have any right or moral ground to criticize others? Imagine a Pakistan with Kashmir as a part of it? Will we not treat them as another persecuted minority? Our rhetoric is just that- rhetoric, hollow and full of hot air. The state may well have failed its charges by not protecting them with adequate laws and procedures, but our society is much worse; intolerant, irresponsible and extremist.
pk.shafaqna.com
